Who else are you thinking of when you talk about “algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists”?
For example, off the top of my head, Tim Behrens, Jeff Hawkins, Josh Tenenbaum, Konrad Kording, Peter Dayan, Randall O’Reilly, every neuroscientist at DeepMind, many many others. The “Brain Inspired” podcast is good, it focuses on this area.
Also, I feel like people misinterpret the no-free lunch theorem…
Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake: “Now, all that being said, the proof for the no free lunch theorem, refers to all possible tasks. And that’s a very different thing from the set of tasks that we might actually care about. Right? Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do.”
UPDATE: I resurrected my aforementioned off-topic deleted section, and published it as a brief self-contained explainer: The No Free Lunch theorem for dummies.
Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake
Yeah, good point. I think I was blindly pattern matching the consecutive mentions of “no free lunch” and “can’t get much better than humanity” to mean they believe the former strongly implies the latter. Probably because I don’t have a good model of his views, so I just interpert them as having whatever model fits some of his statements.
For example, off the top of my head, Tim Behrens, Jeff Hawkins, Josh Tenenbaum, Konrad Kording, Peter Dayan, Randall O’Reilly, every neuroscientist at DeepMind, many many others. The “Brain Inspired” podcast is good, it focuses on this area.
Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake: “Now, all that being said, the proof for the no free lunch theorem, refers to all possible tasks. And that’s a very different thing from the set of tasks that we might actually care about. Right? Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do.”
In an earlier draft, I had a section echoing what you’re saying, but decided it was a bit off-topic, since again Blake is making a different argument. So I deleted it. Eliezer has also written up that argument at https://arbital.com/p/nofreelunch_irrelevant/ & https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/.
UPDATE: I resurrected my aforementioned off-topic deleted section, and published it as a brief self-contained explainer: The No Free Lunch theorem for dummies.
Yeah, good point. I think I was blindly pattern matching the consecutive mentions of “no free lunch” and “can’t get much better than humanity” to mean they believe the former strongly implies the latter. Probably because I don’t have a good model of his views, so I just interpert them as having whatever model fits some of his statements.
Thanks for the recommendations.